Almost all of Sheepshead Bay sits inside the coastal flood zone, and a great deal of it was inundated in 2012. That history changes what a glazing survey is looking for. On an inland block the question about a ground-floor window is whether it still seals; here the question is what happened to it while it was standing in salt water for a day and a half, and whether the opening around it sheds water or holds it. We open up sills and jambs at and below grade rather than taking a clean interior finish at face value, because the damage from a surge event is rarely at the glass — it is corroded fixings and hardware, swollen or delaminated framing behind the trim, and sill details that were never built to drain in the first place. Where we are replacing at-grade openings we detail them to give water somewhere to go, specify hardware and fixings that will survive immersion, and keep the glazing line out of the pocket where water sits. Basement-level and garden-level entrances and windows are the openings we are called back to most often, and they are the ones worth doing properly once.

The second thing that governs work in this neighbourhood is code rather than taste. Southern Brooklyn falls inside the windborne-debris region, so on much of this stock glazing at and near grade needs to be impact-rated or protected, and a like-for-like replacement is not automatically a compliant one. We raise that at survey, because the difference between an ordinary insulated unit and a laminated impact assembly changes the frame, the glazing depth and the price, and finding that out after the glass is ordered helps nobody. Beyond the code, the building stock here is unusually mixed for one neighbourhood: older detached and semi-detached houses on the streets running down to the water, large two-family brick houses built on narrow lots since the 1990s with window openings far bigger than anything in the older stock, six-storey brick co-op and rental blocks along Ocean Avenue and Sheepshead Bay Road, and a waterfront commercial strip on Emmons Avenue that trades on its view. Each of those wants a different survey. The one thing they share is the exposure, and the one mistake common to all of them is treating a coastal opening as though it were an inland one.